Summary

$430K to $3.7M of donations may have been counterfactually caused by RC Forward.

RC Forward appears to have increased donations by 11% to 500%, with a best guess of 25% to 35%

Donating to RC Forward seems between 3 to 55 times more effective than donating funds directly to the EA charities which RC Forward regrants to.

RC Forward is a donation platform through which Canadians can make tax-advantaged donations to high-impact charities located inside and outside of Canada. We hypothesized that previously inaccessible tax incentives and fee elimination offered by this service would increase the donation total and individual gift sizes. This post details a cost-effectiveness analysis of RC Forward in 2018 and some reasons to limit the weight put onto any specific numbers.

We find that compared to estimates of how much would have been donated if RC Forward did not exist, donations appear to have increased by 11%-500%, with a best guess of 25-35%. Operating with minimal resources during its experimental phase, $3 to $55 more may have been donated for each $1 spent, which offers a potentially large impact for funders who cover RC Forward’s costs. We should be clear that the cost-effectiveness estimates are generally less robust than one expects and are only our approximations of uncertain quantitative parameters, which are potentially subject to bias and error. Much of the uncertainty is reflected in the ranges given, but exact numbers should not be taken as high-confidence precise estimates of the actual value RC Forward.

Given the billions of fish raised in these conditions, the strong possibility they often undergo significant suffering, and the potential ability to improve their lives, we believe this is an important area of consideration for animal advocates. We further believe this report helps reduce uncertainty about how to best improve farmed fish welfare.

restore a population of threatened or endangered species (the number of stocked fish seems to be lower)

Fish can be stocked when they are anywhere between the egg stage and multiple years old. The mean time spent in hatcheries/farms seems to be somewhere between 6 days and 4 months. Fish stocked to enhance recreational fisheries tend to be released when they are older than those stocked to enhance commercial fisheries.

Usually, fish are stocked to maximize economic outputs so we shouldn’t expect fish welfare to be given sufficient consideration. It’s unclear how much hatcheries are incentivized to breed healthy and unstressed fish that would have higher survivorship after the release. Bigger fish may also starve and suffer after their release due to their lack of survival skills.

I was unable to find any animal advocacy organization that is working on reducing the suffering caused by fish stocking. I found very few articles that talk about fish stocking from an animal welfare perspective.

Possible interventions include lobbying to decrease the number of fish stocked for recreational fishers and requiring better conditions in hatcheries. I am very uncertain if such interventions would be cost-effective compared to ACE’s recommended charities.

Fish stocking has various ecological effects (e.g., a decrease in the genetic diversity of wild populations) that would need to be well-understood before seriously considering trying to reduce the number of stocked fish.

EAs rate a wide variety of different causes as requiring “significant resources”.

Global Poverty remains the most popular single cause in our sample as a whole.

There are substantial differences in cause prioritisation across groups. On the whole, more involved groups appear to prioritise Global Poverty and Climate Change less and AI and Long-Term Future causes more.

In this article, I first estimate the number of animals raised for pet snake food in the world. Then I discuss some welfare concerns of these feeder rodents by comparing the conditions in which they are raised to the ones recommended for pet mice. Finally, I brainstorm about possible interventions.

Some key findings:

There are between 4.2 million and 7.8 million pet snakes in the world.

160 million to 2.1 billion vertebrates are killed for pet snake food every year. Most of the vertebrates seem to be farmed mice.

Feeder mice are killed when they are anywhere between 48 hours and more than 9 months old. Most seem to be slaughtered when they are less 3–4 weeks old.

Farming of feeder animals seems to involve considerable suffering because they are often living in cramped and possibly unsanitary conditions, which don’t have shelters to hide in, lack daylight and activities.

I haven’t figured out what possible interventions in this space could be particularly promising. It’s possible that the problem is not very tractable.

EAs in the survey come mainly from a set of 5 high-income western populations.

The USA’s share of the EA population has decreased over time.

The UK has relatively higher support for Global Poverty and lower support for AI Risk than the other main countries.

The USA and Canada have a smaller percent of veg*n EAs compared to other large national cohorts of EAs.

Continental European EAs countries have particularly high rates of local group membership.

In this post we explore geographic differences in EA across the globe. A plurality of respondents reported being located in the United States (36.33%), followed by the UK (16.19%). It seems worthwhile to investigate if these populations are distinctly different from EAs elsewhere. This may help to point to causes or dynamics in the movement that are being missed to due to the dominance of these two nationalities.

[An] additional analysis which would be great is if you could identify the 20% of the respondents who seem most involved and dedicated, and then repeat the analysis by source for this sub-group. This would give us some sense of the quality as well as the scale of the reach of different sources.

In this post we explore which EA groups EA Survey 2018 respondents were members of. We find reasonably large numbers of EAs are members of some groups (such as EA Facebook and Local Groups), but much smaller numbers are involved across many groups.

Multiple animal organisations are now focusing on securing corporate commitments to improve animal welfare. And they have been very successful: Chicken Watch lists 1672 such commitments, 1007 of which are set to be fulfilled between 2020 and 2026. However, there is some reason to worry that some of these commitments may be broken:

Someindustrysources doubt whether U.S. cage-free commitments will be fully met. Insufficient consumer demand and lack of funds led to producers slowing down or even shutting down their cage-free conversion plans. What is more, only 27% of U.S. companies included in CIWF’s EggTrack report disclosed their progress towards cage-free commitments.

EAs rate a wide variety of different causes as requiring “significant resources”.

Global Poverty remains the most popular single cause in our sample as a whole.

There are substantial differences in cause prioritisation across groups. On the whole, more involved groups appear to prioritise Global Poverty and Climate Change less and AI and Long-Term Future causes more.